Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Their screams fade into whistles. The whistles drown in wind.

  Twisting on a heel, Atlas faces the remaining thousands. They speed at the sounds of violence, the night rising behind Pylon’s restless, ancient tree. Adrenaline pumps the same acceleration through Atlas’s heart and, his fingers wading portal light, he steps around the ring’s dry exterior, toward the army. They pound their feet. He breathes their taunts.

  He stretches his arms to the road, fingertips low but seething, hands facing Pylon, and stares down the marching mob blotched between yellow blooms. He bathes his palms, shoulder blades, spine in the ring’s radiance as undiluted energy zips up his every bone, through every muscle with healing in its wake. It’s power more exposed than before. Purer. Warmer than sun, the locking of gut, oscillation of breath, and rushing of blood drink star-kissed tonic and are consumed by fire he’s felt only on Gene’s skin.

  Something bumps his shoulder.

  A male Accend wrestles another for space in Pylon’s light, both tracking Gene’s blood around the circle. Atlas glares at them. His irises burn snow-capped cobalt. His hands draw the portal’s glow up his arms, up his neck, around his head in interlacing white vines.

  The Accenda glance at him, double take. Stop. They stare at the light-wreathed superhuman staring back, voltaic swells vibrating off his skin nearly gleaming from the inside out. Then stumble over their own feet on their way backward.

  Atlas looks to the army. He lifts his palms, tenses his fingers, and, snapping his arms forward, flourishes the wind in his veins out his hands. He emits a tornado from alley wall to alley wall. Expels horizontal atmosphere twirling touchless rivers too long contained inside.

  This freedom the Accenda can have.

  A wave slams his back. Above skyscrapers and beyond the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, beyond Mount Washington and suburban thickets stirring with nocturnal watchers, among cloud-sailing raptors and their quelled calls, air kilometers behind Atlas uproots feathers, rustles leaves, ripples waters, whistles between brick as it shoots for his hands. Wind funnels through his back, into body, and bursts out of his palms. Sky joins the force already gushing down his arms. Southwestern currents fling their riptides kilometers to scrape the road where he stands, to hiss in his ears, lap his neck, crash forward his hair and clothing; but none push him. He stands, feet locked, arms outstretched, and becomes the outlet. The gate.

  Atlas roots his gut as his soles root through anointed ground and thrusts from his calves up. He angles his palms a centimeter. Pries open his fingers. Alley fires lie flat and previously unbroken streetlamps explode. Every patch of dithering orange shrinks into the smoke that flees him.

  The Accenda’s foremost figures launch off the road; Atlas tightens his arms and those front ranks fly into the rear, battering down hundreds. Their shouts twist shrill, sharp. Sheets of distortion wrap Atlas’s periphery and a street-wide flood of dirt gives substance to wind—that fawny thick that chases with scourges after flailing bodies, around rattling traffic lights and bending branches too swarmed to distinguish. Turning upward, the Accenda soar toward roofs and claw at air and grab for soil kilometers displaced. Soot clears. Black disperses and brown arrives towing flashes of paper refuse.

  Trees snap. Their flameless embers sprinkle glimmers into the thousands that skid road backward. Shrieks bound off building walls, through the city. Street signs break into the breaking of their screams exerting in decrescendo under wind’s roar and distance’s debris, and they scream like the citizens of Corvus did, like the City Hall charity attendees.

  Atlas’s scowl twitches. An aerial glass shard slices his leg but he doesn’t feel it.

  Overturned sedans slide into buildings and one of Eden’s SUVs drags after, its rear angling forward. It leans onto its left tires. Then tips, crashes its doors into road, scrapes raw its body and mirror and light bar while all metal muscles of a five-ton beast skid toward Atlas. Its grille within reach, the vehicle surrenders to wind as it passes him and pursues faraway bodies. The other two SUVs trail. The first tumbles by head; Atlas ducks; and the second rolls after the first, smashing sidewalk and planters till screeching into vanishing point, out of sight.

  Gasping, Atlas raises his arms and widens his cyclone. Clouds brew above. His gusts draw them, his hands directing them. Pylon soaks in Gene’s blood still, still grows its white-hot beam, but doesn’t stop the cool front from chasing heaps of gathering cumuli. Purple cloud eclipses the moon. Pylon shines alone.

  Atlas shivers and blinks. Wind pushes the Accend army from view, their smoke strewn up far sky, dirt rusting its iron gray blended into clouds. The street empties.

  Sky growls muffled cracks: thunder. It knocks at wind’s ocean overflowing Atlas’s ears and diffuses in eroding notches and he shakes all the same. His hands threaten to tremble off aim. A lightning bolt glints building edges and a raindrop splashes his forehead, runs down his nose, splatters upon road; and he chokes.

  His knees sink and tensed brows lift. Baring his teeth, Atlas groans.

  And crumples. All the way down. His power fizzles beneath his hands slapping brick. The wind dies. Litter flops to rest. Quieter than sleep, deeper than death, the silence that follows blares.

  His flush subsides. His pulse slows. The charge under skin slips into remission where it shrivels and moans and Atlas listens to a sheet of settling cardboard whisper goodbye.

  His face contorts. Eyes heating, he presses his fingerprints into grooves between brick and wrinkles face’s grimace upward.

  He sobs.

  He chokes convulsions under his slouching shell. Then sniffs and thrusts every muscle in the backs of his legs to push him onto his feet.

  Turning from bodies, Pylon, and drifting plastics, Atlas stumbles back to the building at the intersection’s corner. His heart jolts but settles; Gene lies unmoved on the structure’s ledge, tucked in the corner between surface and wall far enough from his deluge. He coughs the dirt from lungs, waves the dirt from eyes, and staggers to her.

  He presses his stomach into the ledge’s stone and leans over it. He scans Gene from head to toe. Skin white, mouth open, she slumps into the drool under her cheek. Dried blood paints her arms but liquid scarlet wets her front. Thick, dark stains overspreading her shirt, stains in his eyes—red—rivers of—so much—Atlas’s throat constricts.

  He whispers, “Gene?”

  She lies still.

  Pressing an arm over her waist cut, Atlas holds his hand to her neck and counts her heartbeats. One? A dozen rapid beats in the same second? He angles his ear to her chest and hovers his hand over her mouth. Her breath brushes his palm in shallow increments. He exhales.

  “Wake, Gene. You must—” Atlas sighs. “Gene, open your eyes. Gene.”

  He grips her shoulder and jolts her. She shakes, settles.

  “Life will be stupid unless what? Remind me.”

  Her breath softens. Her blood dampens Atlas’s arm. He looks at it and chokes.

  “I spawned a storm,” he shakes her, “and you missed it. You missed much. Awaken so I can recount the events to you.”

  With his free hand, Atlas curls his fingers around her purple ones and squeezes them. He rubs the cold flesh in his palm. Thunder booms through the street, through Atlas’s spine, and rain taps the ground and their heads and hands. The water slipping around his knuckles as the rain that shivered him weeks ago in one Pittsburgh back alley feels warmer than her.

  “Tell me what to do. I don’t know—” Atlas grimaces and glances down the street. “Samuel’s away and he may not be—he can’t assist us any longer and you’re—” His eyes widen. “Help me, Gene. Dear Imperium, please help me.”

  Rain splatters on her forehead. She doesn’t budge.

  “Genesis.” He pants and jerks her and clutches her shirt. “Gene. Help me!” Eyes fogging, he glares through the tears that fall to her shoulder and grabs her cheek. “I can’t live—”

  Gene gasps. Her eyes open and dart to Atlas’s hand against h
er face. She cringes.

  “Ouch.” She sucks breath through her teeth. “Needles.”

  Atlas tightens his grasp. Holds his exhale.

  “Stingy. Hurty.” Gene squints at Atlas. “Person.”

  Gaping, he wipes his cheek on his shoulder and says, “Walker.”

  “Atlas?”

  He bends in and kisses between her eyes. Lips to her forehead, he fits his palms to the hollows under her jaw, strokes her cheek once, and releases his exhale of an earthquake as he withdraws.

  Gene squirms. “Owie. Lemme go.”

  Stiffening, Atlas jerks back a notch and slackens his hand to rest upon her arm. He sobs once into his chest.

  “Why’re you crying? Your face s’all cut,” Gene says. “Are you okay?”

  He bursts out laughing. Shaking his head, he sniffs and then scoffs. “No.”

  She frowns.

  “You illogical girl.” Atlas sputters a breath. “Am I? Are you?”

  Gene bites her lip and strains her eyes toward her stomach. “I feel woozy.” She grunts. “And achy.”

  “Lie still. You’ve lost much blood.”

  “You’re hurty.” She studies Atlas. “Your hand—it stings. Like it’s full of electrizity.” She trails her eyes up to his head and makes a face. “Wha’s with your hair? All,” she weakly flicks out her fingers, “whoosh.”

  Atlas’s brows draw. He sweeps his hand over his head; his hair sweeps him back with an upward rigidity that holds against the rain.

  Breath accelerating, Gene looks around scraping her head right and left. “Are—’s Samuel okay? Where’s Eden? Where’re they?”

  “I—” He scans the road. “I don’t know.”

  She grabs Atlas’s sleeve and hangs on to it. “You have to find him.”

  “Gene, when I drove wind through the street, I don’t believe—”

  “You have to.”

  Atlas tilts his head, rain rolling down his ear, and softens tone. “Gene.”

  “We have—” Gene’s hand floats to her waist. She winces. “He would look out for us.”

  “We have to leave. You’re injured. It isn’t safe and Pylon remains on the brink of rupture.”

  “Portal thingy. Do you think it has enough . . .” Forehead crumpling, Gene closes her mouth.

  “I suspect Pylon has a sufficient amount of your blood,” Atlas says. “Direct power will trigger its opening. Exactly as it’s always been: an emission of ionized force onto the catalyst that cracks the boundaries between dimensions.”

  “But,” she curls her fingers around his arm, “it’s always been gold that opens portals.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Then why my blood—”

  “Dulcissime,” Atlas cups a hand over hers, pressing it into his arm, “perhaps you should be labeled the more naïve of us two.”

  The corner of Gene’s mouth lifts. In mind, Atlas summons memory’s poor map of Pittsburgh’s alleys and slides his arm under Gene’s knees—

  An explosion.

  Atlas jumps up straight. His ears split and spine petrifies and hot wind blasts his back. He slides his arm out from under Gene’s legs and flips around, hands spread but windpulse slow to reach them.

  Gene stretches her neck, peeking around Atlas. She asks a question but it drowns under the ringing that bounces through his skull. His eyes reflect fire.

  Volcanic fire launches through the sky in a vortex a few meters wide, kilometers tall, consuming rain and surpassing lightning. It spins as it rises. Road to cloud, fire clothes Pylon in brash orange and satin gold and molten steel vines swirled into blood red bubbling as magma’s depths. Air’s iron scent swells.

  “ ‘Direct power’?” Gene asks.

  Atlas’s gut drops. “Eden.”

  “Atlas, wait—”

  “Lie still,” he bores his stare into her, “don’t make a sound, and, as well as you’re able, keep pressure on your wound. I’ll return in an instant.”

  Twisting forward, Atlas thrusts out of inertia and limps toward Pylon and its churning pillar. He whispers, “Et consumimur igni.”

  His eyes blur the entwining billows. The flames grow brighter, closer, and Atlas glares in entranced disconnect. Pylon crackles and shimmers and impales sky’s black canopy with crescents of highlights drilling between cloud rolls. Beyond industrial potential, beyond manmade force, Pylon’s power sinks heat of hearts, of emotion and adrenaline and stars into Atlas until he drips water not pattering his head.

  He lowers his gaze. At Pylon’s base glows a symbol that wasn’t there before.

  It’s a replica of an image he saw in The Presage, road its canvas, Pylon its center. The Cartographer’s drawing of joint peaks in Sideran soil now cradles a three-dimensional cyclone, pearl-neon contours instead of dirt finger-strokes. A valley. Horizon’s doorway. All warmth Atlas felt when he first saw it corrodes as he watches a sun of bleeding blaze complete the hieroglyphic dawn he thought was his.

  It flickers; an emerald spark shoots from the inferno. Pylon’s base then blooms cyan, cyan that braids up the cyclone, then magenta, then yellow glimmering as Sideran plains. Atlas’s eyes follow the rainbows as they climb. The fire sways right, then left, and colors unnamed join the already known in waltzing, spouting a multicolored geyser that lances the thermosphere three hundred kilometers above view.

  The road warps. Blistering wind smashes rain into Atlas’s face. Through his lifted fingers, Atlas flinches and glimpses in the flames a sliver—one tiny, centimeter-wide sliver—of blue sky. He stumbles the last steps forward.

  “Still wandering?”

  Eden stands to his left, her palms open to Pylon. She drives fire into its base. It gives another burst and, behind the flame wall, inside the sliver of a blue fissure, Atlas hears voices. Muffled yells. Chanting.

  Eden frowns. “Shouldn’t you be in the obituaries by now, darling?”

  Atlas scowls and snaps his palm onto her silhouette.

  “I was.”

  His red face pales. Eyes wide, Atlas jerks to his right. Samuel staggers toward Pylon, clenching his revolver in one hand and his stomach in the other, blood dripping from his jacket, into puddles of rainwater. He aims his weapon at Eden.

  “B-but you probably missed it,” Samuel yells over wind, “ ’cause they spelled my name S-A-M-U-L-E.” He squeezes the trigger. “Mortifying.”

  XLVIII

  Steps

  “See what I did?” Samuel glances at Atlas. “ ‘Mortifying.’ ”

  Atlas beams and looks between him and Eden. “I did understand that one. Mortify derives from the Latin root—”

  The revolver discharges and a wall of wind slams Atlas, Samuel, and Eden, spraying mist into their eyes. Eden screams; her peal, wind’s whoosh, shot’s boom jar Atlas’s brain. She cuts her fire stream and grabs her right hand. It drips blood.

  Eden’s fire twirls its tail up Pylon, the last flames chasing the first kilometers skyward, but orange bursts cleave to pillar’s ionic vitality for survival. They disperse in tantrums. They snap and roar and recede up their coil dissolving into clouds, past them, fading into lightning that mimics Pylon’s pearlescent branches unveiled once again. White replaces orange. Yet the portal’s sliver of sky, splitting open Pylon’s trunk as a knife slicing an Elisium portal, doesn’t close.

  Eyes rolling back, Samuel clutches his stomach and sways sideways. He blinks, grumbles, sways the other way. Halfway squinting, halfway sleepwalking with roving slitted eyes, he re-aims his trembling revolver.

  “Allow me your weapon.” Atlas outstretches his hand. “You’re in no state—”

  Samuel shakes his head.

  “Samuel.”

  Chanting pours from Pylon. The portal widens, Atlas’s eyes too. Rain soaks his tunic and fire sputters into death above, but Pylon’s frame around cloudless, dry sky expands still. Sun touches his shoulder. It streaks his face and squints his eye—that stationary flare that saturates the scalps of figures emerging; hair all brown, clothing
all white, words all the same flood the dimension Atlas peers kilometers through. Common citizens stand in ranks behind the gateway now half a being wide.

  Disappearing into horizon without curvature, tens of thousands of constellation laborers lift their heads to the world of their subconscious and push toward earthly darkness dilating the fear decades-deep in their eyes. They wave Imperial flags. They cry words of Praise. Sparking more than all colors, the outward cyclone girding Pylon blasts Atlas’s front, and song echoes through the streets.

  Sidera lands squawking.

  Eden falls to her knees, grasping her hand, heaving garbled moans over it. Samuel clicks back his revolver’s hammer.

  “You,” he laughs and chokes, “stabbed me.”

  Atlas eyes the portal. “Samuel—”

  “And n-not in a lighthearted, just-kidding way.”

  Eden draws her bloody hands beneath her grimace and yells, “As a human, how does organ failure feel?”

  “Human?” Samuel yells.

  “Cease this.” Glaring into Sidera, Atlas strains voice over the chanting, angles against the wind. “Shoot her and be done!”

  Samuel chatters his bared teeth, turns pale purple, and scowls into his revolver’s sights. He twitches. The gun’s bore wobbles this way, that. He squeezes minimized its drunk pendulum swing and gasps and glowers down the barrel aligned with Eden’s chest.

  “Dissentientes abolebimus,” Siderans sing. Imperium guards yell something and the portal’s gap stretches three persons high.

  Samuel constricts his trigger finger. His blood splatters the rain, rain that streams over Atlas’s eyes and behind his ears, down his back, to the road swirling bass-bounced puddles.

  “—abolebimus. Porro ad aequitatem communem.”